Remember the old days of RAM disks? Well. Linux has them too! If you’ve never tried them, a RAM disk is a virtual file system that runs entirely from your PC’s main memory, which means it’s lightning fast to read and write anything you want. How much space you choose to allocate to your RAM disk is down to how much RAM you have and how much you plan to use it - if you have 1GB of RAM, you can easily spare 64MB for a ramdisk; if you have 2GB you can probably spare 256MB, and if your are fortunate enough to have 4GB then you can easily stretch your RAM disk legs with 1GB. Here’s how to setup a 64MB disk - just change the 65536 for the size you want:

sudo mkfs -t ext3 -q /dev/ram1 65536
sudo mkdir -p /ramdisk
sudo mount /dev/ram1 /ramdisk -o defaults,rw

Remember: If your PC gets switched off accidentally it all gets wiped!

1 Comment

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  By Ben, March 18, 2009 @ 7:32 pm

  Thanks for this. Is it viable to copy programs here at boot time so that they’ll run faster, or is something like preload a better option?

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